An art exhibit called "Flowers Before the Frost" opens Friday at Gallery Art and Framing, featuring the work of Tony Pope, Marion Simpson, Alice Tersteeg and Carole Baker.

A reception will be held at the gallery at 3340 Fritz Cove Rd. from 3 to 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18. The artists also will be at the gallery throughout the weekend, from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Tersteeg teaches printmaking, batik and a variety of art courses at the University of Alaska Southeast. She'll feature a number of watercolors of orchids and other flowers. She grows some of her subjects indoors at home.

Marion Simpson has been working with flowers for years as a gardener. Recently her interest in flowers broadened to working with them in watercolors and pastels.

"This is her first showing of flowers which is not a horticulture event," said Sharron Lobaugh, who runs the gallery and organized the show.

Artist Baker spent years commercial fishing and lives in Gustavus with her husband and son. She's inspired by the landscape around Gustavus and wild flowers from the area and her garden. Watercolor has been her principal medium.

She's pursued artistic studies through a variety of workshops and classes. In recent years she also moved into printmaking, first intaglio and later woodblock prints done using the Japanese Hanga technique.

Pope will exhibit 20-by-30-inch color photographs of Southeast Alaska mushrooms. Pope is well-known in Juneau for his talents as a framer, but he has long been interested in photography.

"I haven't been doing a lot in the last few years but it was something I was avid about in my youth," he said.

In the late 1970s he spent several months photographing the cities, people and churches of Mexico using a large-format camera, an 8-by-10-inch Deardorff. Now equipped with a 35-millimeter Leica, a much smaller camera, he focuses in close to create large macrophotographs. He uses an Elmarit R, a 60-millimeter macro lens as his main tool.

He's taken a number of flower photographs, but said for this show he wanted to feature mushrooms. He gets in close, six to 10 inches, to make his pictures.

"They're very startling when you see them in this format," he said. "It's really up close, in your face."

He said one of the five photographs was taken on the Windfall Lake trail.

"One picture is of the most perfect chicken of the woods mushroom I've ever seen," he said. "I was hiking up the trail and took the picture, and I figured I'd pick the mushroom on my way back and eat it that night. But you know how that goes. It was gone when I came back. But I got the picture."